Sakura Ritsuki’s Team 14 Trains for Nearly Four Hours, Then Settles on a Team Name

NIJISANJI — Team 14 of Nijisanji’s Niji Ika Matsuri 2026 Splatoon 3 tournament held its first meeting on Monday, with leader Sakura Ritsuki spending nearly four hours teaching rules and running practice matches alongside Kisara, Minamo Madoka and Elu the Elf. The evening ended with the group choosing a team name, 水とーよ.

Ritsuki introduced herself as the team’s leader and told the others to ask her anything. She took them through a private lobby to look over the stages, explaining how Splat Zones and Tower Control are won, pointing out flanking routes behind the enemy, and covering controls such as jumping to a teammate from the map and returning to spawn when a fight turns bad. Madoka said afterward that she had played fewer than ten hours of Splatoon.

“I’m playing a team game like this for the first time, and it really feels like we’re all doing it together. That makes me happy.” — Minamo Madoka, after the session

About an hour in, the team joined a private match against another team and played on for hours, swapping weapons and roles as it went. The group set one goal for each match, such as timing specials together even at the cost of a loss, and agreed to press the in-game ‘I was defeated’ signal so teammates could see where enemies were. Madoka’s tornado special landed in the later matches, and a teammate told her it was good, especially for a first-timer. Chat wrote ‘What a comeback!’ and ‘Tornado Madoka is here!’ during that stretch, and later said it was Elu’s breakout stream.

After close to four hours, the team realized it still had no name. Kisara offered 水とーよ, which she said she came up with half in jest. It nods to a Kyushu dialect and to Madoka’s love of water: she said she wanted a Kyushu element without leaving Madoka out. The others called it cute and settled on it, and chat began posting the tag #水とーよWIN.

Madoka said she would study gear before the team’s next session and hoped to line up schedules for another meeting. Elu said she would be back at 10 a.m. the next day with a solo practice stream. Ritsuki’s broadcast carried on after the others signed off, going back through recorded matches to look at what had worked.